The executive-search firm people come back to
Six former colleagues have returned. The average consultant has stayed ten years. Eight in ten employees call it a great place to work, against fewer than five in ten at a typical Singapore company. HR Trends UK names Kerry Consulting Singapore’s Best Workplace 2026 — for the rarest achievement in any people business: people who do not leave.
Kerry Consulting’s reception on the 31st floor of Suntec Tower 4, Singapore. Photo: Kerry Consulting
What the recognition measures
Most workplace awards measure how people feel in a survey week. This one measures what they did over a decade.
HR Trends UK names Kerry Consulting Singapore’s Best Workplace 2026 on three facts, each of them on the public record:
- Six former colleagues have come back. In his August 2026 letter to clients and partners, founder and CEO Declan O’Sullivan reports that six former colleagues have chosen to return to Kerry in recent years. He calls it “a meaningful indicator of the culture we have built”.
- The average consultant has stayed ten years. In an industry known for its revolving door, Kerry’s consultants have an average tenure of a decade.
- Eight in ten employees call it a great place to work. Kerry was certified as a Great Place to Work in Singapore again in October 2025. Eighty per cent of its employees said it is a great place to work, against 49 per cent at a typical Singapore-based company.
Recruiters are the best-informed job-changers in the world. They know every firm in the market, every open desk and every salary on offer. When a recruiter stays, it is never for lack of options. That is why, in executive search, retention is the hardest number to earn — and why it is the number this recognition rests on.
A survey tells you how people felt in a week. Attrition tells you what they decided over a decade.
The people who came back
Consider what it means that six people who left Kerry Consulting have come back.
Not one, which could be an accident. Not two, which could be a coincidence. Six colleagues who walked out of a firm that describes itself as the largest and most experienced executive recruitment firm in Singapore, tried a market they knew better than anyone, and returned to the 31st floor of Suntec Tower 4.
Add a founding member who still leads a practice twenty-three years on. Add an average consultant tenure of ten years. Add an office where the person at the next desk was there a decade ago and expects to be there a decade from now.
A firm that keeps its people still grows. Nine new colleagues joined Kerry in 2026 alone, and its founder says the firm has added them while preserving “experience and continuity”. When Great Place to Work surveyed the firm in 2025, its employees named teamwork and mutual respect as the defining features of the place, and described a supportive environment where people are encouraged to share ideas, develop professionally and take ownership of their work.
Ask the firm why its people stay, and the answer does not begin with money. It begins with a word that rarely appears in a recruitment firm’s brochure.
Family.
2003: a founder decides to trust
Declan O’Sullivan has lived and worked in Europe, the United States, Australia and Japan, as well as Singapore. In 2003, the year SARS tested the city’s nerve, he opened Kerry Consulting and made the decision that would define the next twenty-three years.
He let go.
Founders build firms by holding on — to clients, to decisions, to control. O’Sullivan built his by handing his consultants their desks, their clients and their judgement, and trusting them with all three. It was a bet that people who are trusted become trustworthy, and that people treated as owners behave like owners. Two decades on, the firm’s practices are led by a team of eight Executive Directors, and the founder is still the CEO.
The delegation was never abdication. O’Sullivan still writes to clients, candidates and colleagues in his own name, in open letters that report how the firm is doing — its momentum, its hires, its plans. His August 2026 letter, addressed to “friends and business partners”, reports a strong year, a clear shift towards more senior, retained and advisory-led search assignments, and a new Digital Infrastructure practice for the data-centre and compute economy. It reads less like a chief executive’s update than like a letter home. Trust, at Kerry, flows in both directions, and it starts at the top.
Four values, each wired into a process
Culture statements are cheap. What makes Kerry’s unusual is that each of its four — trust, integrity, compassion and transparency — is wired into a process, so that it would survive even if nobody ever said the word.
Trust is wired into the shape of the job. Consultants are given their clients and their judgement, and measured on what they deliver rather than the hours they are seen at a desk. Senior people sit beside junior ones, so nobody learns the craft alone.
Integrity is wired into hiring. A search firm’s only product is the truth about people. Fairness and transparency in the recruitment process are a condition of employment at Kerry, not a slogan on a wall.
Compassion is wired into the calendar. When life intervenes — a bereavement, a new baby, an ageing parent — the firm’s first question is what the colleague needs, not what the quarter needs. Nobody keeps score on the time it takes to come back.
Transparency is wired into the founder’s own habits. A chief executive who tells the world, in writing, how the business is doing has nothing to hide from the people who work inside it. Kerry’s people know where the firm stands because the firm has said so in public, before anyone had to ask.
Nobody gets given up on
Every company says it values its people. Kerry has a rule that costs money, and it has kept it for twenty-three years: nobody gets given up on.
A consultant who has a difficult year in a difficult market. A colleague facing a family crisis. A young recruiter who is not yet the recruiter they will become. In most firms, each of these is a conversation about performance. At Kerry, each is a conversation about support — and about time, which the firm gives more generously than anything else.
In any single quarter, that is the most expensive philosophy in the business. Over two decades it has proved the cheapest decision the firm ever made, because it is the reason the six came back and the reason so few ever leave.
This is what people mean when they call Kerry a family. Not the soft version, where nobody is held to a standard — the real one, where the standard is high and the loyalty is higher. The firm’s own people say so on the record. “In under a year I was recognised for my efforts and promoted,” says Senior Consultant Daniel Chay on Kerry’s Great Place to Work profile. Senior Secretary Shafiqah Shahlan says the firm “has rewarded me greatly”, and points to the “strong diversity of thought among colleagues”.
Security, at Kerry, is not a clause in a contract. It is the feeling of walking into an office where the people around you were there five years ago and will be there five years from now — and knowing that, whatever happens, so will you.
Companies win awards. Families keep people.
Twenty-three years, and still at their desks
Audrey Chan was a founding member of Kerry Consulting. Twenty-three years after the firm opened, she leads its Human Resources practice from the same office — and when The Straits Times needed to understand wealth-management hiring in September 2026, or CNA wanted a view on agentic AI at work, she was the person they called. Patricia Teo leads the Technology practice. Across the firm, eight Executive Directors run its practices, and the average consultant has been at Kerry for ten years.
In executive search, that is not a sentimental statistic. It is the product.
A consultant who has spent a decade in one market has watched a client’s leadership team turn over three times and knows why each time. She has followed a candidate from associate to managing director and knows what he is actually like when things go wrong. Relationships like these cannot be bought, hired or transferred. They can only be kept — and they are kept by keeping people.
It is why Kerry’s clients are moving more of their most sensitive work to the firm. The founder’s August 2026 letter reports a clear shift towards senior, retained and advisory-led assignments, the searches a client only gives to people it trusts. The commercial case for compassion turns out to be very simple. The firm that never gives up on its people ends up with the people nobody else can get.
A firm that could not keep its own people would not be asked to explain everyone else’s.
A piano on the ice
In 2025, a Singaporean pianist played a grand piano on moving Arctic sea ice, at roughly 81 degrees north, to draw the world’s attention to a warming planet. Two years earlier she had played in Antarctica. In between, she took her piano to Bhutan’s Royal Highland Festival — and Kerry Consulting sponsored the film that tells that story, The Girl and Her Piano, a documentary that has since won awards in Berlin, Los Angeles and Bhutan, aired on PBS and premiered on YouTube in August 2026.
It is an unusual thing for a search firm to fund, until you understand the firm. Kerry’s guiding principle is “Returning the Human to Resourcing”, and it does not stop at the office door. The firm supports Community Chest, Food from the Heart and Mandai Wildlife, and its founder reports tens of thousands of dollars given this year to causes that will never place a single candidate. Its consultants build professional communities the same way — over evenings such as Finance After Five, CTRL+ALT+CONNECT, Sip & Sync and Numbers Night Out, where clients, candidates and colleagues meet as people first and job titles second.
That human instinct has become Kerry’s sharpest edge in the age of automation. The firm has invested in AI and in its digital platforms, opened a Digital Infrastructure practice, and publishes in five languages for a multilingual region. But its founder calls balance “a clear point of differentiation”: technology serves the judgement of experienced people, not the other way round. A workplace where everyone stays is, by definition, a workplace where everyone belongs.
A piano on moving ice: something fragile and beautiful, kept steady on ground that will not hold still. It is not a bad description of what Declan O’Sullivan has built.
What HR leaders everywhere can take from it
Kerry’s record travels. Three lessons from Singapore apply to any people business, in London or anywhere else.
Measure what people did, not how they felt. Engagement scores move with the mood of a survey week. Attrition, tenure and the number of people who come back cannot be gamed in a quarter. If a board wants one number for the health of a culture, that is the one.
Design trust in; do not declare it. Kerry’s values survive because each one has a process behind it — judgement handed to consultants, integrity tested at the hiring stage, time given when life intervenes, and a founder who reports to his own people in public. A value with no process behind it is a poster.
Time is the benefit that keeps people. Competitive pay gets people through the door. What keeps them through a bad year is knowing the firm will give them the time to recover from it. The firm that never gives up on its people ends up with the people nobody else can get.
A home, not a stop
Kerry is hiring. It always is, because a firm that keeps its people still grows. What it offers is rarer than a vacancy. You will be trusted before you have finished proving yourself. You will be trained by people who have done the job for a decade. You will be measured on what you deliver, told the truth about how the firm is doing, and given time when life demands it. And on the day everything goes wrong — because it does, for everyone — you will not be given up on.
Awards are given for a year. Kerry Consulting has earned something that lasts longer: the loyalty of the people who know it best. Six of them tested the market and came back. One has been there since the beginning. In an industry that runs on movement, the firm has built the one thing nobody can headhunt away.
A home.
“This recognition reflects the dedication of our team, who have built a culture we can all be proud of. ‘Returning the Human to Resourcing’ has always been our guiding principle, and it applies not only to how we work with clients and candidates, but also to how we support one another within the firm. Our people’s teamwork and care for each other make this certification especially meaningful.”
— Declan O’Sullivan, Founder & CEO, on Kerry Consulting’s Great Place to Work certification, October 2025
About Singapore’s Best Workplace 2026
Singapore’s Best Workplace 2026 is HR Trends UK’s recognition of the Singapore employer whose record on retention, tenure and workplace culture sets the standard for its industry. It rests on the public record: the attrition and tenure the firm reports, its independent Great Place to Work certification, and its published people practices.
About Kerry Consulting
Founded in Singapore in 2003 by Declan O’Sullivan, Kerry Consulting is an executive search, selection, interim solutions and market-mapping firm serving Commerce & Industry, Financial Services and Technology clients across the region. It describes itself as the largest and most experienced executive recruitment firm in Singapore, is Great Place to Work Certified (2025–2026), and publishes in English, Chinese, Malay, Indonesian and Tamil. Its guiding principle is “Returning the Human to Resourcing”. Kerry Consulting is at 6 Temasek Boulevard, #31-05 Suntec Tower 4, Singapore 038986. kerryconsulting.com